Updates

Seems like I’m just going to keep spinning those plates. Poor Bill Ward is still waiting on me to write the next comment on our long overdue Corum post. Chris Hocking may still be waiting for me to get back to writing up something for Wade Miller for our Hardboiled Monday posts, but that’s been so long forgotten that he may not remember.

Meanwhile the Kickstarter is going well and I’m busy behind the scenes working to promote it in various places. I’m also trying to revise one novel while trying to finish writing another. Also busy being that part time house/farm husband, including training a new puppy. None are impossible duties in the least, it’s just hard to do everything at once.

Since I have nothing really to report, I thought I’d fill the post today with shots of various parts of my office/library. Some of the books pictured belong to other members of the family.

And no, I haven’t read all of these, but I’ve sure read a lot of them. Some multiple times. Others are part of the TBR pile. It’s a great thing to look around the office and see all the cool stuff I’m looking forward to reading…

11 Comments on “Updates”

I love shelf pictures! We have a lot of similar tastes in comics. Shame on you Howard! I see kull volumes and the Busiek Conan series and I don’t remember and blog posts from you about them. Maybe I missed them.

Are the Kull volumes any good?

I stopped with Savage Sword of Conan Vol. 5 because of your reviews. If i find some of the later volumes for cheap i’ll pick them up.

I stayed away after the first volume of DH reprinting of Marvel’s Conan. I don’t like the new coloring.

I read Simonson’s Thor for the first time last year. They just did a reprint of the omnibus with the new coloring (blasphemous IMHO.)

Elfquest is something that has been on my to read list for a couple years. But I’ve never gotten around to it. Something about how the Elves are drawn weirds me out.

and finally Where is your board game shelf?! You have to have one for all those solitaire games you play.

I used to own the first 5 or 6 new Conan collections, but the only one I really seemed to want to revisit was volume 1, and the two volumes penned by Thomas. I regret, a little getting rid of a few other earlier volumes now, but I haven’t rectified that issue.

What did you think of the Simonson run? Pretty grand for the most part, wasn’t it? Do you think the new Thor movie is going to show us Skurge’s last stand? I can’t help noticing that he’s carrying an AK-47 in the trailer.

Elfquest — something I discovered in junior high and quite enjoyed back then. When I met the woman who would become my wife it turned out she’d found it and loved it, so those are a series of gifts for her, slowly acquired while we were poor as church mice students. I re-read them more than a decade ago with the kids, and you know what, those are pretty cool stories. Not strictly sword-and-sorcery but not high fantasy either. Certainly not Grimdark, although there’s death in there of some good characters. Why quibble about genre definitions? It’s good stuff.

Dude, you have no idea how much I wanted to have a shelf set up for my solitaire gaming. It just takes up too much bookshelf space. As a result, half of the games are in a hall closet and the other half of them are in my office closet. I’d like to have them all in a row on proud display, but I’m just not set up for it. When and if we finally get our basement remodel done I’ll probably set them up on a dedicated shelf there. That way there can be a dedicated table where I can leave the more complicated ones set up for days or weeks on end.

The Conan comics I’m mostly familiar with are a collection of Roy Thomas’s that included a crossover with Michael Moorcock’s Elric. It was a pretty standard story but it was fun seeing Conan and Elric together. I’ve also read the first issue of the Wonder Woman/Conan crossover which was a pretty promising start.

Oddly enough, Wonder Woman also met Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser in story written by of all people Samuel Delaney.

Simonsons Thor was great. It was one of the first things I read when I got the Marvel Unlimted App.

I’be tried to avoid Thor Ragnarok spoilers but I’m pretty sure they are going to put Skurges last stand in there. I think the director or Karl Urban might have tweeted a page from the comic a while ago.

I don’t see how you can have a script that contains Hela, a big name actor as Skurge, a movie called ragnarok and NOT have Skurges last stand in it. M

It also looks like they are incorporating a lot from Planet Hulk as well.

There’s a lot of duplication, but there also are a few things within that aren’t in the other books. I’m away from the desk right now — I’ll try to remember to pull them down in the next few days and provide more of a sense of what is and isn’t there.

Nice pictures, I love seeing what everyone else has on their shelves. Not surprisingly, a lot of overlap with my own library. I’m particularly jealous of the Parker series – even if I mostly stick to e-books nowadays.

I’m not much for matched sets, but I love having that one. I just wish it was complete. Last time I checked they still hadn’t printed the final five or six, because they’re still under license with another publisher.

You can always GET them built in. We hired an excellent Amish carpenter to make those for me. The wife wanted a horse property, and I said, “alright, if I can have a library.” I think she got the better end of the deal, because once we paid for the shelves we were done with maintenance, whereas I have constantly to care for horses. Mere moments from now I’ll stagger out into the pre-dawn darkness to let them loose into the pasture, water them, take care of chickens, feed barn cats, etc. It would be more dreadful if middle-age wasn’t making me wake up every day before 6:00 anyway.